Artist Resources – Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87)
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The Andy Warhol Museum The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts Artist Resources – Andy Warhol (American, 1928-87) “I think it would be so great if more people took up silk screens so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else’s.” Warhol commented in a 1963 interview about the Pop Art movement . “I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.” Warhol appeared with Edie Sedgwick on the Merv Griffin Show in 1965, complete with antics in which Sedgwick spoke for the Pop artist. “We don’t have any feeling about [paintings] at all, even when we are doing them...It just keeps us busy. It’s something to pass the time,” Warhol commented during a haphazard interview at the Factory in 1966 on art, film, and celebrity. “Whatever anyone else says has no value to me concerning my work. I don’t need approval. I have confidence in what I’m doing.” In a video interview at the Factory in 1966, a journalist attempted to get Warhol to discuss his interests and motivations about printing, collaborations, and film. “I’m trying to see what else a camera can do. I’m mostly concerned with doing bad camera work. We’re trying to make it so bad but doing it well, where the most important thing is happening you seem to miss it all the time, or show the most scratches on a film or all the dirt you can get on a film…so that everybody knowns you’re doing a film,” the artist commented. In 1977, Warhol spoke with his own Interview Magazine, which he established in 1969 for underground film. “I’d rather do new stuff. The old stuff is better to talk about than to see. It always sounds better than it really is. New Warhol in New York studio, 1962 Photography: Evelyn Hofer things are always better than old things,” reflected Warhol on his career, the art business, money, and creativity. The Milwaukee Art Museum and The Brooklyn Museum brought together 50 pieces in 2010 in the first exhibition in the U.S. to focus on Warhol’s final decade of work, a period of prolific creativity, experimentation, and multi-media innovation. 2018 saw the first retrospective of Warhol’s work in the U.S. in thirty years, which toured the Whitney and the Art Institute of Chicago, among other major institutions, through 2020. Andy Warhol: From A to B and back again explored Warhol’s career, legacy, and contemporary relevance through over 400 artworks and the perspectives of research and scholarship that has emerged since the artist’s passing, The Tate Modern brought together Warhol’s iconic works with those never-before exhibited in the UK for a comprehensive and intimate 2020 touring retrospective that explored the artist’s origins and personality. Digital resources include a curator’s tour and gallery-by-gallery exhibition guide, in addition to a look into Warhol’s printing techniques and interviews. Warhol, 1976 Warhol’s enigmatic and stubborn persona received in-depth treatment in a 2020 biography. The author spoke about his 500-page tomb Photography: MiChael Childers and the nuance of researching the unreliable, mythic, and extremely popular artist. Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Rorschach, 1985 Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas Private Collection; L2020:121.1 Andy Warhol achieved widespread popular and commercial success in New York in the early 1960s with his paintings and silk screens drawn from consumer products, advertising, and celebrity culture. Begun in 1984, his Rorschach series is one of the few in which Warhol did not appropriate pre-existing images, taking inspiration from the inkblot test invented by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach in 1921, which was one of the most widely used analytic tools of the 1960s. To achieve the characteristic mirrored image, Warhol painted one side of his canvas before folding it vertically to print the remaining half. Like its eponymous inkblot, the result blends chance and abstraction with an innate desire to seek out recognizable forms. In characteristic Warholian commentary—always to be taken with a grain of salt—the artist admitted to apparently misconstruing the purpose of the test, assuming each inkblot to be the creation of the patient, intended to be interpreted by the psychiatrist. He envisioned a reading and interpretation of his own creations as a finishing touch to the series. On view December 23, 2020 – March 28, 2021.